The latest round of court-ordered email releases revealed at least 125 messages containing classified information, including several sent by Hillary herself. The Clinton campaign responded with their favorite excuses: The emails weren't classified at the time, and they weren't marked classified at the time. Those distinctions are legally meaningless based on the laws and rules governing the handling of sensitive material, but perhaps they're partially reassuring to a concerned public and media. Enter Reuters, which first dumped ice water on this particular justification back in late August. It's just not true that all of those newly-released emails with sensitive data were only deemed to be classified after the fact, the news agency reports:
"Here's my personal email," Hillary Clinton wrote to U.S. special envoy George Mitchell on a summer Sunday in 2010 as he telephoned one European official after another in an effort to keep peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians on track. "Pls use this for reply," Clinton wrote in her email, sent from the clintonemail.com account she set up on an unsecured, private server in her New York home for her work as secretary of state. Over the following hours, Mitchell wrote back to Clinton with summaries of his conversations, including one with Spain's foreign minister, who had briefed him on discussions with Palestinian leaders. The State Department has redacted the summary of the minister's thoughts, saying it is classified information...Clinton has maintained she did nothing wrong. She says she sent no information via email that was classified at the time, and received no material marked that way. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is examining Clinton's server to see whether information was mishandled...U.S. government regulations examined by Reuters say this sort of information, whether written or spoken, must be classified from the start, and handled through secure, government-controlled channels. The Clinton-Mitchell correspondence is one of 57 email threads found by Reuters in the latest batch of emails released on Monday that the State Department has marked as including the same type of information.
More details that explode Clinton's go-to explanation:
In all the 87 email threads examined by Reuters, the State Department has blanked out the confidential information in the public copies, adding the classification code "1.4(B)", denoting foreign government information. This is the only kind of information that presidential executive orders say is "presumed" to likely harm national security if wrongly disclosed. State Department regulations describe it as the "most important category of national security information" its officials encounter. If the State Department's markings are correct, it appears that Clinton and her senior staff routinely did not follow the regulations in the department's Foreign Affairs Manual, which tells employees they "must" safeguard foreign government information by treating it as classified. "It's hard to square the secretary's conduct with the strict letter of the FAM," Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists' government secrecy project, said in an email. The department and spokesmen for Clinton have declined requests to explain this apparent lapse.
Routine disregard for classification protocols. Placing sensitive -- and in some cases, top secret -- intelligence on an unsecure private server that national security experts believe was undoubtedly penetrated by foreign governments. Mrs. Clinton's merry-go-round of excuses has produced a dizzying array of provable lies. The public is not impressed:
WaPo Poll: Among registered voters, Hillary's image now thirteen points underwater at 43-56. Among all independents, she plummets to 39-59.
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) September 2, 2015I'll leave you with this: